Union Minister of Women and Child Development (WCD), Mrs. Krishna Tirath made a claim that 90% of Indian women are housewives who do not get any salary for the housework that they do and hence her proposal of forcing husbands to pay salary to their wives must be considered.

Media gave wide coverage to her views and Tirath mentioned that within six months the proposal would be sent for review to the Govt. Even other feminists and women’s rights activists started dancing around the proposal with some calling it ridiculous, some welcoming it, and some even going to the extent of saying that instead of salary, share in property should be given.

The bottom line for all this was very simple. Feminists want a free run for women and that too at the cost of men. The irony of the fact is, society supports this stance of feminists, against men, including men themselves.

However, coming back to the article, an application under the Right to Information Act, 2005 was filed before the Honorable Union Minister of Women and Child Development, asking them the data based on which the conclusion that 90% of Indian women are unpaid housewives was arrived at.

After a few initial hiccups, the reply that was received from the ministry was that they had no such data to backup Krishna Tirath’s statements.

1. So, when a Union Minister can lie in public without any data and wants to get laws passed based on hallucinated assumptions, should we trust such a Government?

2. Is it not high time that gender biased anti-male laws and proposals should not be over-hyped by the media if they aren’t backed by proper and credible data?

Is it not time to pass saner laws which reflect the real condition of the society and not something which is blindly relied upon due to stereotypical social assumptions?

Let the WCD Ministry give salary from the huge foreign funds that it is getting by spreading lies about women being harassed and tortured as this ministry has never taken up the cause of older women or mothers-in-law who are harassed by their daughters-in-law who are looting husbands by making false complaints . The earning women should also contribute to the household expenses and those mothers-in-law who are looking after their grand-children should get salary from the daughters-in-law.

In contrast to the ideal of families as having an internal nature beyond justice, some feminists have even proposed using a marriage contract to determine the domestic division of labor. They argue that by moving marriage from an implicit status based, patriarchal arrangement to an explicit contract, women’s freedom and equality would be enhanced (Weitzman 1985). This proposal has been criticized on several grounds: as inattentive to the background inequalities would give rise to unequal bargaining power in such a contract (Sen 1989); as potentially undermining to intimacy and commitment within marriage (Anderson 1993) and as opening the door to illiberal intrusions into family life, given the need for states to enforce such contracts (Elshtain 1990).